Primo Levi - Mostly Dance

Two blogs ago, I wrote about creating the 8-minute piece Kaddish. It soon became a regular in our repertory, performed in concerts, Holocaust memorial programs, and on the bema before the Kaddish prayer. Over the next fifteen years we were often invited to participate in Holocaust memorial programs, particularly in November around the time of Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”; see June 14, 2019 blog for explanation) and in late April or early May for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust memorial day, based on the Jewish calendar). It wasn’t until 1996 that I choreographed the next piece that became a part of our Holocaust repertory.

As long as I can remember, it was important to me that pieces related to the Holocaust be part of the Avodah Dance Ensemble’s repertory. At the age of 12 or 13 I saw the original production of The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway with Susan Strasberg as Anne Frank and Joseph Schildkraut as Otto Frank. It was during my first trip to New York City with my parents, when we saw several Broadway shows, The Diary of Anne Frank being the only drama. I remember the evening well. We had seats in the first row and I was mesmerized by the play and the performances. I experienced the power of how theater can teach and emotionally engage one in learning. After that I regularly read and learned more about the Holocaust and as I developed as a choreographer it was a natural next step to create pieces like I Never Saw Another Butterfly and Kaddish.

The idea for the new piece, Shema, inspired by Primo Levi’s writing, came from Rabbi Oren Postrel. I hunch that Rabbi Larry Raphael (of blessed memory) probably introduced us, knowing that Oren had a very strong background as a dancer who had seriously studied ballet and performed in the Oakland Ballet. Oren shared Primo Levi’s writing with me and soon we were developing a piece based on it. Primo Levi (1919–1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor. Much of what we used in our piece Shemacame from his best-known work, If This Is A Man, about his time as a prisoner at Auschwitz.

The choreography was not only inspired by Primo Levi’s poetry but also by the Broadway play Bent, written by Martin Sherman. The play, which I saw in 1980, revolves around the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany. I found the second act particularly powerful with its stillness and senseless repetition as the two main characters move a pile of stones from one side of the stage to the other. When it came time to choreograph Shema I wanted to use some kind of repetition to hold the piece together. So throughout the whole piece the four dancers walk in a straight line back and forth across the stage in the back part of the performing area. Each dancer steps out of the line to share their poem in words and movement and when done goes back into the line. Jack Anderson in a review in The New York Times, May 31, 1997, describes it well:

Shema effectively contrasted relentless pacing, representing concentration camp regimentation with sudden outburst, symbolizing the prisoners’ turbulent personal feelings.

From a video of the piece, April 15, 1996, performed by the dancers who helped to create it, in a Yom HaShoah Service at
Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion
Dancers from l. to r. Kezia Gleckman Hayman, Elizabeth McPherson, Beth Millstein, and Carla Armstrong
Here’s the link to the video

As in the earlier Holocaust piece I Never Saw Another Butterfly, the dance is done in silence and to the voices of the dancers.

As I was writing this blog I came across an editorial in The New York Times published on May 26th (2019). It was written by the Editorial Board, which “represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.” The editorial clearly states that anti- Semitism is sharply on the rise and gives statistics for the increase in Germany and France in particular and also points out that it is not only coming from the far right, but also from the Islamists and far left. The authors mention the increase here in the United States, and end by saying:

Speak up, now, when you glimpse evidence of Anti Semitism, particularly within your own ranks, or risk enabling the spread of this deadly virus.

It is with a deep sadness and concern I read this and realize the truth in what they are saying. I fear we are on the edge of a cliff right now and I echo that we all have a responsibility to speak up and not allow discrimination in any form.

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Continuing the blog entries on my international work, I flew from Israel back to Italy, and Kezia arrived there from the U.S., and so rehearsals began in earnest for the upcoming performance for the Pitigliano Festival of Jewish Film and Culture.

In the February 2000 Avodah Newsletter, Kezia reported:

Our trip to Italy came about in great part through the extensive organizing efforts of former Avodah dancer and dear friend Deborah Hanna Leoni, who had been living in Italy (and teaching dance there) since 1992. It was Deborah and two of her delightful advanced students whom I joined to form Avodah’s Italian company. Deborah and her husband Jeevan generously housed JoAnne and me in their country cottage in the very beautiful Tuscan village of Tarquinia, a center of ancient Etruscan life, about 45 minutes from Rome and 15 minutes from the Mediterranean Sea. With stone streets and buildings tinted in warm fresco shades of gold and orange and green with castle-like wooden doors, Tarquinia is a hill town with an expansive view of velvety green countryside. For people who teach, as we do, I believe it is a good reminder to return periodically to being a beginning-level student of anything – to remember just how bare – and frustrating – beginning knowledge is. Since neither JoAnne nor I speak Italian, we had a good dose of “beginnership,” but we found that people determined to find a common understanding are reassuringly able to do so.

We also figured out puzzling light switches, door latches and toilet mechanics, learned to wash dishes using the least possible amount of water (start with that handy pot of water left from boiling pasta) and functioned for periods (common) when the water was turned off or the electric was out. (The cottage was perfectly and appropriately lovely in candlelight.) Our Italian alarm clock each morning was the gunshot chorus of local men hunting for small birds on the property. We deciphered money and purchased groceries (everything FRESH), ate pine nuts from the ground and gourmet mushrooms picked by Jeevan’s family, and watch his mother make us homemade gnocchi. We learned that, like nearly everything else in life, there is a skill to hanging wash on a clothesline – and we did not have it. We were made sharply aware of how luxuriously we usually live, particularly in terms of the use of water, electric and gas, and I felt downright wealthy when I returned home and was able to wash and dry all my clothes at the laundromat. We learned that in Italy, concepts of “efficient” and “businesslike” do not exist as we know them in New York; “casual,” “social” and “personal” are the critical elements of life, as is “generous.” And they do make for a charming, if drastically different, life. For a high school workshop, the students each contributed a sum toward our booking, and we were paid with an envelope of small bills and coins, like the collections I remember for elementary school “milk money.” I – who am still surprised each time JoAnne pays me for dancing – have never felt such a direct connection between my work and my pay.

From JoAnne’s scrapbook: Scenes from Deborah and Jeevan’s land.

The theatre in Pitigliano had a historic feel to it. The stage was just large enough but it did present a bit of a challenge as it was a raked stage (meaning that it sloped upward away from the audience). Fortunately the dancers were able to adjust quite quickly.

Back entrance to the theatre where we performed

The performance consisted of six pieces, and one of them was created for this special event. Entitled Generations,it was inspired by the Hebrew phrase “L’dor V’dor” (“from generation to generation”) and focused on the Jewish woman’s role of carrying on tradition. In seeing a video of the piece, I wasn’t sure at all what I was really trying to say. How I was able to watch a video of the piece was an interesting story in itself. Deborah reminded me that there was a video of the performance and thought that Kezia had a copy of it. It was a VHS which is very outdated and most of us no longer have VCR machines that can play such tapes. Kezia however does still have a VCR, but she doesn’t have the means to transfer a VHS into a format such as an mp4 which would be easy to send over the Internet. So, resourcefully, Kezia played the video on her VCR and filmed it on her phone and sent it to me.

Screenshot of the piece Generations. Kezia is on the floor and Deborah is behind her. In the background are our Italian company members Sylvia Manciani and Anna Compagnucci (two of Deborah’s advanced students at the time).

The other pieces were: Hallelu – a setting of the 150^th Psalm; Negro Spirituals – four solos from Helen Tamiris’s work (danced by Kezia) which had been reconstructed by Elizabeth McPherson from the Labanotated score; M’Chamocha – a piece celebrating the crossing of the Red Sea; Kaddish – a work set to 8 minutes from Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish symphony, and Shema – a setting of Primo Levi’s writing. Search this blog site for entries describing some of these pieces more fully. In the Avodah Newsletter Kezia described performing Shema:

Most memorable in this performance was the inclusion of our repertory work Shema based on the writings of Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. JoAnne insisted on performing this work, defying suggestions that Italian dance audiences prefer lighter pieces. In Shema the dancers speak excerpts from the writings of Primo Levi. In this performance the text was recited (by our Italian actress, Elisabetta Irrera) in its original Italian. The impact upon the audience was powerful, earning the longest applause of the program.

Deborah Hanna in Shema, with Elisabetta Irrera (the Italian actress who spoke the text in Italian) behind her.

Curtain call following the last piece, Kaddish.

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Tag: Primo Levi

Another Holocaust Piece, Based on the Writings of Primo Levi

Performance in Pitigliano